Hi, and welcome to post #1 about the first official release of Windows Live Movie Maker. This is a follow-up to previous posts (here and here) on this blog about the Movie Maker beta, and will give you an update on where we are. My name is Mike Torres, and I’m the Lead Program Manager on the Movie Maker team. I joined the team last fall just around the time we were finishing the beta release, and I’ve been having a blast ever since.
We’re looking forward to the official release of Windows Live Movie Maker (“v1”) later this year. Judging from the feedback we’ve heard from people using the Movie Maker beta, we know there are lots of questions about the product, and that there’s a lot of passion around Movie Maker in general. We want to make sure we have an ongoing conversation with you as users of the product through this blog and keep you informed and up-to-date. Equally as important, we’re actively listening to and considering your feedback to enhance and improve Movie Maker. We know we’re at the very beginning of a long journey with the new Movie Maker, and we look forward to sharing the details with you along the way.
Last year we began with a simple mission statement that encapsulates our overall goals for the product:
Windows Live Movie Maker is the best way for everyday people to create stunning 5-minute movies with minimal time investment and share them online immediately.
When we set out to build Windows Live Movie Maker, we heard loud and clear that people wanted their movies to simply look better with less effort. In order to meet customers’ needs, we first looked at how people were using Windows Movie Maker in Vista. What we found was that most movies were quite simple – often just a set of pictures with captions and a soundtrack with occasional small clips of lightly edited video with transitions. We also discovered that many people found the approach of Microsoft Photo Story 3 to be a great solution and loved the ease of selecting pictures, a soundtrack, and adding a narration track over their photos with basic animations. Increasingly, we found people publishing movies to popular video sharing sites to share with friends and family (in addition to occasionally creating DVDs).
We also found that lots of people used the timeline view in Movie Maker, and those who did were mostly interested in fitting their movie to audio or aligning videos and photos to music. There were many more features in Movie Maker than most people used or wanted to use, but some of them were not easy enough to find, or required them to switch to the timeline view to really take advantage of them.
Planning a “v1” (version 1) release of a product like the new Movie Maker requires input from Windows customers around the world with all levels of experience. Throughout the fall and early winter, we spent a lot of time collecting feedback through ongoing usability studies and from active users, as well as through the Customer Experience Improvement Program, which gives us information about how people are using the beta. We used this information and market trend data from our Planning team to solidify our approach. In January, we locked on an updated plan with a commitment to ship the first release of the new Movie Maker this year. Throughout this process we’ve continued to learn a lot about what everyday Movie Maker customers use, want, and need.
We also learned a lot by releasing an early beta of Movie Maker last year. People were surprised (or shocked, rather!) at the limited number of transitions, effects, and overall functionality in the program. We wanted to release the beta to start the conversation about the use of the ribbon and some of the overall changes to the software model, but in hindsight, the application just wasn’t useful enough for that. So, thanks for bearing with us as we’ve continued our work on Movie Maker.
Some of the top things we’ve heard from you:
- You’d like more transitions, more effects, multiple soundtracks, and more video editing features like trim and split. As movie makers ourselves, we’re in the same boat as you are. We want those fun “shatter” transitions and “warp” effects just as much as you do! We’re definitely working on improving this and plan to have a range of rich-editing capabilities in the first official version.
- You’d like something resembling a timeline in the product. In the Movie Maker beta, the storyboard didn’t have the ability to represent time like a traditional timeline would. We’ve heard you say that you’d like to be able to drag and drop clips to get them to start and end where you want, and that you’d like to have music and text that span multiple photos or video clips. We’ve also heard that you’d like to – at a glance – see which clips are longer than others, which clips have effects applied, and which clips have transitions. Now, I don’t want to give too much away just yet (we still have work to do!), but we’re definitely aware of these limitations. We’ve developed a new approach that we think will help address some of the shortcomings of the beta and will scale well from novice to experienced users without requiring people to switch views in order to get things done.
- You’d like to use Windows Live Movie Maker on Windows XP. Given the technical requirements, unfortunately we won’t be able to support Windows XP at this time. But Windows Movie Maker 2.1 for Windows XP is still a great option if you’re still using Windows XP. As we mentioned in our initial post about Windows Live Movie Maker last October, we’ve built a new engine for Movie Maker that makes use of some of the latest and greatest technologies available on the Windows platform. Introduced in Windows Vista (and supported in Windows 7) is a new graphics driver model, which brings more reliable and stable support for high-end graphics. We’ve also built our new engine on top of DirectX, which improves speed and enables even more advanced capabilities over time. Finally, we’ve also built Windows Live Movie Maker on top of the new Windows 7 Scenic platform (and have brought it to Windows Vista as well) which makes our new user interface possible.
Given all this information about what people want, we set out to meet the following top design goals for Windows Live Movie Maker. We use these design goals as our “North Star” and make sure we’re addressing them every step of the way.
- Make it easy to create a movie in a few steps (even if you’ve never done it before).
- Provide a new user interface with “simple smarts” to ease creation.
- Focus primarily on publishing online (and to DVD).
- Allow more experienced people to go deeper when they need to (without sacrificing simplicity).
- Deliver the highest-quality movies possible.
Over time, we’ll blog in more detail on these design goals and how they’re reflected in the product. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback on them.
Thanks for joining us on this journey. We’re going to continue to monitor your feedback and jump into the fray where we think we can help. While we can’t respond personally to that feedback, we’ll absolutely be reading all of it. In the meantime, stay tuned for more information on Windows Live Movie Maker!
Happy movie making,
– Mike Torres
Windows Live Movie Maker team
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